The object I watched that evening was not a streak of light high in the upper atmosphere. It was a black sphere with orange tongues of fire covering its entire surface. Not a tail. Not a trailing wake of light behind a bright point. Individual, distinct orange flames covering the object like it was burning from the outside in, all the way around — not a glow, not a haze, but discrete tongues of fire on a black surface.
Frederick R. Smith
Words 2,520 | Read Time 11 min | Enjoy
An Unexpected Letter from the Past
When I published the first installment of this story in October 2025, I had no idea it would lead me to Jack Myers.
But that is exactly what happened. My Substack essay — a ten-year-old’s backyard memory of a slow-moving fireball on an April evening in 1966 — found its way via a Substack comment to a man who had been carrying the same memory for the same fifty-nine years, from twelve miles away. Jack Myers read Part One and responded. Myers had been eleven years old that same evening. He had written about it. And his book, Kecksburg’s Sequel?, was waiting on Amazon.
I read it. And before long, I had to put it down — not because it wasn’t gripping, but because I needed a moment. Here was someone who had been watching alongside me, from twelve miles away, and neither of us had known it until now.
(Kecksburg’s Sequel? is available on Amazon — well worth your time if any of this resonates.)
The Question That Never Left
If you read Part One, you know the detail that haunted me most: the speed — or rather, the lack of it. A meteor is supposed to vanish in a blink. Everyone I had seen before or since does exactly that — a white scratch across the dark, gone before the eye can fully register it.
I told myself for decades that memory was playing tricks. I was ten years old, after all, and had never seen anything like it. But this one glided overhead within my viewport for 15 seconds or more.
Jack Myers, at eleven and twelve miles away, remembered the same thing.
What I Saw. What the Record Won’t Explain.
Here is where the official story starts to come apart.
The object I watched that evening was not a streak of light high in the upper atmosphere. It was a black sphere with orange tongues of fire covering its entire surface. Not a tail. Not a trailing wake of light behind a bright point. Individual, distinct orange flames covering the object like it was burning from the outside in, all the way around — not a glow, not a haze, but discrete tongues of fire on a black surface.
I should add something here that I have only recently articulated clearly: I cannot remember a tail. Not a faint one, not a partial one. Nothing trailing behind it. For a meteor or fireball, that absence is remarkable — a tail or wake is one of the defining visual signatures of atmospheric entry. What I remember instead is the sphere itself, complete and self-contained, consuming my entire attention. I was so utterly fascinated by the object — by its shape, its fire, its deliberate movement — that the surrounding sky barely registered. A ten-year-old standing in his backyard, frozen, staring upward. That is the honest picture.
And it was close enough that I could hear it.
A crackling sound reached me on the ground — not a distant boom, not a sonic concussion, but a crackling, like burning wood or live electricity. The kind of sound that has a source you can locate. The kind of sound that does not travel to a ten-year-old’s ears from an object in the upper atmosphere dozens of miles overhead.
That detail has bothered me for fifty-nine years, not because it was frightening, but because it has never fit the explanation I was handed. And it turns out I was not the only one who heard it. Myers notes near the end of his book that observers in Canada reported hearing hissing and crackling noises during the fireball’s passage. Not after. During. That is not the acoustic signature of an object sixty miles above the Earth. That is the sound of something close enough to the ground that multiple witnesses, spread across a wide geography, independently registered it with their own ears.
The official account and the physical evidence of multiple senses — mine, and those of the Canadian observers — are not reconcilable. One of them is wrong.
And I know what I heard.
A Note on Bolides — and Why the Science Cuts Both Ways
The official reports place the object high up in the atmosphere, a remote bolide burning through thin air miles above the ground, visible across multiple states precisely because of that altitude. Myers, in one passage, quotes a scientific characterization of the event using that framing: a bolide, atmospheric, distant.
A bolide, for those unfamiliar with the term, is an exceptionally large and bright meteor — a fireball on a grand scale, often brighter than the full moon, produced when a substantial object penetrates deep into Earth’s atmosphere. Unlike an ordinary shooting star, which is little more than a grain of sand burning up in an instant, a bolide is large enough to produce sustained light, audible sound, fragmentation, and sometimes ground impact. The crackling I heard is consistent with a known bolide phenomenon — electrophonic sound, in which the object’s electromagnetic energy is converted into audible crackling at ground level, sometimes arriving simultaneously with the visual event rather than after it.
But here is the problem. Used honestly, the bolide science does not support the “high and distant” framing — it undermines it. A bolide close enough to produce audible crackling, close enough to reveal discrete orange tongues of fire on a black surface, is a bolide that was low. Not safely tucked away in the upper atmosphere. The official account and the physical evidence of my own senses are not reconcilable. One of them is wrong.
And I know what I heard.
A Third Witness — and a Simple, Devastating Argument
Myers’s book introduces another witness whose account deserves to stand on its own. Joe Chmielewski was in Northeast Philadelphia that same evening. He, too, saw the object pass directly overhead. He too described the flames — the same fire, the same presence, the same object that Myers and I watched from our separate backyards.
Joe reported no sound. But Northeast Philadelphia in the evening is not a quiet place. The ambient noise of a dense urban neighborhood — traffic, voices, the general roar of a city going about its business — would have drowned out anything short of a sonic boom. My own crackling was audible because I was standing in a quiet suburban neighborhood outside the city, where the night air carried sound cleanly. Joe Chmielewski’s silence is not a contradiction. It is what you would expect.
What Joe did offer was something arguably more powerful than sound: a size argument. The authorities claimed the object was sixty miles up — at the very top of the atmosphere. Joe pushed back on that directly, and his reasoning is as plain and commonsense as it gets. An airliner cruising at six miles altitude, he noted, is little more than a dot in the sky. A barely visible speck, even on a clear day. What he saw overhead was nothing like a dot. It was large. It had visible detail. It had flames he could describe.
If the object had been sixty miles up, Joe Chmielewski would not have seen flames. He would not have seen a sphere. He would have seen, at most, a point of light.
The authorities’ claim and Joe’s eyes cannot both be right. Joe was there. The authorities were not.
What Myers Found — and What He Doubts
Myers acknowledges the scientific framing. He notes it. He does not rest on it.
Because the official characterization of what we saw — a natural meteor event, fully explained, case closed — has always felt like it was trying a little too hard to close a door. Myers, who grew up in the same shadow of the 1965 Kecksburg incident that hangs over anyone who spent their childhood in this region, is not satisfied with tidy explanations. His title’s question mark is not decorative. It is the whole argument.
The Kecksburg Shadow
The 1966 fireball and the 1965 Kecksburg incident are separated by just under sixteen months. On December 9, 1965, a large, brilliant fireball was seen across six states and Canada, and residents of Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, reported finding a metallic, acorn-shaped object roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle partially buried in the woods — an object that military personnel subsequently removed on a flatbed truck.
Witnesses to the Kecksburg object reported that it did not move like a meteor. It appeared to travel slowly, change direction, and descend in a controlled rather than random manner.
That last part. Slow. Controlled. Deliberate.
Myers and I both saw something that moved the same way, sixteen months later, roughly 300 miles to the east. We were children. We reported what we saw to adults who smiled and changed the subject. The official record called it a meteor and moved on.
Maybe it was. But the pattern of dismissal — the reflexive reach for the most mundane explanation, followed by institutional incuriosity — is one that anyone who followed Kecksburg will recognize immediately. In that case, the object was described by multiple witnesses as turning and descending slowly, as if making a controlled landing, with a semi-buried, metallic, acorn-shaped object observed on the ground by several independent eyewitnesses. What the military took from those woods, and why, has never been fully accounted for. NASA issued a 2005 statement reporting that experts had examined fragments from the area, but records of their findings were lost in the 1980s.1
Records lost. Case closed. Move along.
Another Possibility Worth Naming
There is one more theory that deserves an honest mention, and it is not an exotic one. The mid-1960s were the height of the Cold War reconnaissance satellite program. Both the United States and the Soviet Union routinely placed spy satellites in low Earth orbit — and occasionally lost them. A satellite in trouble, re-entering the atmosphere at a low angle and shedding material as it came apart, would present to a ground observer as exactly what I described: a dark object, close, moving slowly and deliberately, burning in a way that was not the clean streak of a natural meteor.
It would also explain why authorities were so quick to close the conversation. A crippled reconnaissance satellite over the Philadelphia suburbs in 1966 was not something anyone in the government was eager to discuss in the middle of the Cold War. Whether what I saw was a meteor, a bolide, or something built by human hands that had gone badly wrong, the official response — label it, file it, move on — was the same.
Two Children. Twelve Miles. One Sky.
Myers and I were not acquainted. We grew up in the same region, twelve miles apart, with no shared framework for what we had seen and no one who took it seriously. We filed our memories away and carried them forward alone for nearly six decades.
What his book does — quietly, without sensationalism — is establish that we were not confused, not misremembering, and not alone. We were ten and eleven years old, standing in separate backyards, watching the same object cross the same sky. We both noted the same anomaly. We both grew up doubting the explanation we were handed.
When I read Myers’s account and found my own memory staring back at me — the slowness, the fire, the sheer presence of the thing — it was not the comfort of shared delusion. It was the discomfort of shared accuracy. Two independent witnesses, twelve miles apart, agreeing not just on what they saw but on why the official story never accounted for it.
The Question Mark
Myers chose his title carefully. Kecksburg’s Sequel? — not a statement, not a revelation, but a question, aimed directly at the idea that the 1965 incident was an isolated, resolved event. His suggestion, and mine, is that the skies over this region in the mid-1960s were producing phenomena that the official record was not designed to accurately capture.
We may never know what crossed the sky that April evening in 1966. The authorities offered partial, carefully worded answers. What they did not offer was an explanation for why a ten-year-old boy in a Philadelphia backyard could hear it crackling overhead, or see the individual orange tongues of fire that covered its black surface, or watch it move with the unhurried pace of something that knew exactly where it was going — and remember, decades later, that there was no tail.
Those details are not compatible with “meteor, high altitude, case closed.”
And nobody in charge ever tried to explain them.
A note of personal gratitude is in order here. Jack Myers, in writing Kecksburg’s Sequel?, did something that fifty-nine years of private memory could not do on its own — he jogged details back to the surface that I had not thought about in decades. The crackling. The individual orange tongues of fire. The texture of the thing. Reading his account from twelve miles away brought my own back into focus with a sharpness I did not expect. For that, Jack, I am genuinely thankful.
Parting Shot
The recent government UFO file releases — the collection declassified under the Trump administration beginning May 8, 2026, published through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) — do not appear to include any specific document related to an April 25, 1966, fireball incident over Philadelphia and north into Canada. That specific event doesn’t surface in any of the published summaries or indexes of the released materials.
The files are housed on that dedicated government site, with additional files being added on a rolling basis. The first batch consisted of 162 records — 120 PDF documents, 28 videos, and 14 images — from the Pentagon, FBI, NASA, and State Department. Thus, stay tuned to PURSUE (what a wacky acronym) for more on the April 1966 incident. However, since no green men were associated with this event, it will likely remain in the history books as a simple (baloney) bolide. 📕
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Saw it from our front stoop that night, it came right up our little Fishtown sidestreet, passing overhead, orange fireball, green sparks, southerly flight. I remember it vividly. But I never obsessed about it. Figured it for space junk or a natural object, but you raise good questions. [Thinking about it, the green sparks would seem to indicate copper burning off, suggesting a man made object.]
Very interesting. Thank you. I suppose I ought to search for Part 1.
I think there are many big things NASA has been hiding from us for a long time.
I think of the Apollo program where we were told we landed our astronauts on the moon.
I do not believe that is true. We did not land anyone on the moon.
What a horrible big lie.
I think about an old friend of mine who had just gotten an engineering degree from Texas A&M University and had happily just gotten a position with NASA Johnson Space Center, technically in Houston Texas, but located very near Clear Lake city area.
He walked me through the main lobby area of that facility one night after official business hours and I guess he was confident he had an employee pass and it was OK for us to be there.
There was a space craft capsule in the lobby. I do not know if it was an old used one or just a mock-up. That is about all I remember. It did not seem to be set up to be an area for tourists to stroll through.
I did not suspect about NASA what I do now. But I am sure he worked there until retirement. I wonder if somewhere along the way as an employee there he came to realize what a sham and big lie the whole NASA operation is. NASA is still on occasion peddling that same big lie.
We the people are coming to see and understand many big ugly lies we have been told by our government on just about everything.
I hope and pray this better understanding we now have can be used for the glory of Christ the King.